by James Ellroy
When I finished I looked up to find Walt Kraus staring down at me. “I pulled some tails and got what you wanted,” he said. “The robbery was big-time, off an aircraft carrier bound for the Pacific. Forty-five pounds of morph—enough to supply every hospital ship in the fleet and then some. Three Marine liaisons were guarding it. Someone slipped them something, and they passed out. The snatch was made at three o’clock in the morning. The infirmary was picked clean. It never made the news because the navy high brass kiboshed it. DeVries and his sister and two others were strong suspects—they were all assigned to pharmaceutical supply, but they all had tight alibis. They were all questioned repeatedly, jailed as material witnesses, and finally released. The dope was never recovered. They—”
“What were the names of the other two suspects?” I blurted out.
Kraus consulted some papers in his hand. “Pharmacist’s mates Lawrence Brubaker and Edward Engels. Underhill, what the hell is the matter with you?”
I stood up, and the squad room, Kraus and Lutz reeled in front of me.
“Underhill?” Lutz called as I started to walk away. “Underhill!”
“Call Will Berglund,” I think I shouted back.
Somehow I made it out of the police station and out into the hot Milwaukee sunlight. Every car and passerby on the street, every fragment of the passing scene, every inundation of the red brick midwestern skyline looked as awesome and incredible as a baby’s first glimpse of life out of the womb and into the breach.
21
There was only one Cadwallader in the Milwaukee-Waukesha area phone directory: Mrs. Marshall Cadwallader, 311 Cutler Park Avenue, Waukesha. Rather than call first, I drove directly there, straight back over Blue Mound Road.
Cutler Park Avenue was a block of formerly ritzy townhouses converted into apartment houses and four-flats. Cutler Park itself—“Wisconsin’s Greatest Showplace of Genuine Indian Artifacts”—stood across the street.
I parked my loaner and went looking for 311, checking out house numbers that ran inexplicably out of sequence. Number 311 was at the end of the block, a two-story apartment house guarded by a plaster jockey with one arm outstretched. The front door was open, and the directory in the small entrance foyer told me that Mrs. Marshall Cadwallader lived in apartment 103. My suspicion was that Mrs. Cadwallader was a widow, which suited my purposes: a single woman would be easier to question.
I felt my pulse race as I recalled the photographs Maggie had shown me of her adventurous-looking father. I walked down a hallway lined with cheap prints of southern plantations until I found number 103. I knocked, and the very image of what Maggie Cadwallader would have looked like at sixty-five answered the door.
Startled by this permutation of time and place, my now familiar insurance cover story went out the window and I stammered: “Mrs. Cadwallader, I’m a friend of your late daughter’s. I investigated her…” The woman blanched as I hesitated. She looked frightened, and seemed about to slam the door in my face when I caught myself and continued: “…her death for the Los Angeles Police Department back in 1951. I’m an insurance investigator now.” I handed her one of my cards, thinking that I almost believed I was in the insurance racket.
The woman took the card and nodded. “And you…” she said.
“And I believe there are other deaths tied in to Margaret’s.”
Mrs. Cadwallader showed me into her modest living room. I seated myself on a couch covered with a Navajo blanket. She sat across from me in a wicker chair. “You were a friend of Maggie’s?” she asked.
“No, I’m sorry, I mean…I didn’t mean that. I was one of four detectives assigned to the case. We—”
“You arrested the wrong man and he killed himself,” Mrs. Cadwallader said matter-of-factly. “I remember your picture in the paper. You lost your job. They called you a Communist. I remember thinking at the time how sad it was, that you made a mistake and they had to get rid of you so they called you that.”
I felt the queerest sense of absolution creep over me.
“Why are you here?” Mrs. Cadwallader asked.
“Did you know a woman named Marcella DeVries Harris?” I countered.
“No. Was she Johnny DeVries’s sister?”
“Yes. She was murdered in Los Angeles last month. I think her death was connected to Margaret’s.”
“Oh, God.”
“Mrs. Cadwallader, did Margaret have a child out of wedlock?”
“Yes.” She said it sternly, without shame.
“In 1945 or thereabouts?”
“On August 29, 1945.”
“A boy?”
“Yes.”
“And the child…”
“They gave up the child!” Mrs. Cadwallader suddenly shrieked. “Johnny was a drug addict, but Maggie had good stuff in her! Good Cadwallader-Johnson stock! She could have found herself a good man to love her, even with another man’s baby. Maggie was a good girl! She didn’t have to take up with drug addicts! She was a good girl!”
I moved to the grandmother of Michael Harris and tentatively placed an arm around her quaking shoulders. “Mrs. Cadwallader, what happened to Maggie’s child? Where was he born? Who did Maggie and Johnny give him up to?”
She shrugged herself free of my grasp. “My grandson was born in Milwaukee. Some unlicensed doctor delivered him. I took care of Maggie after the birth. I lost my husband the year before, and I lost Maggie and I never even saw my grandson.”
I held the old woman tightly. “Ssshh,” I whispered, “Ssshh. What happened to the baby?”
Between body-wrenching dry sobs, Mrs. Cadwallader got it out: “Johnny took him to some orphanage near Fond du Lac—some religious sect he believed in—and I never saw him.”
“Maybe someday you will,” I said quietly.
“No! Only half of him is my Maggie! The dead half! The other half is that big, dirty, Dutch drug addict, and that’s the part that’s still alive.”
I couldn’t argue with her logic, it was beyond my province. I found a pen on the coffee table and wrote my real phone number in L.A. on the back of my bogus business card. I stuck it in Mrs. Cadwallader’s hand.
“You call me at home in a month or so,” I said. “I’ll introduce you to your grandson.”
Mrs. Marshall Cadwallader stared unbelievingly at the card. I smiled at her and she didn’t respond.
“Believe me,” I said. I could tell she didn’t. I left her staring mutely at her living room carpet, trying to dig a way out of her past.
* * *
—
“My baby. My love.”
“Where is he?”
“His father took him.”
“Are you divorced?”
“He wasn’t my husband, he was my lover. He died of his love for me.”
“How, Maggie?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“What happened to the baby?”
“He’s in an orphanage back east.”
“Why, Maggie? Orphanages are terrible places.”
“Don’t say that! I can’t! I can’t keep him!”
* * *
—
I ran through Cutler Park searching for a pay phone. I found one and checked my watch: ten fifteen, making it eight fifteen in Los Angeles. A fifty-fifty chance: Either Doc or Michael would answer the phone.
I dialed the operator, and she told me to deposit ninety cents. I fed the machine the coins and got a ringing on the other end of the line.
“Hello?” It was unmistakably Michael’s voice. My whole soul crashed in relief.
“Mike, this is Fred.”
“Hi, Fred!”
“Mike, are you okay?”
“Sure.”
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s asleep in the bedroom.”
“Then
talk quietly.”
“Fred, what’s wrong?”
“Ssshh. Mike, where were you born?”
“Wha-what? In L.A. Why?”
“What hospital?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s your birthday?”
“August 29.”
“1945?”
“Yes. Fred—”
“Mike, what happened in the house on Scenic Avenue?”
“The house—”
“You know, Mike; the friends you stayed with while your mother went on her trip four years ago—”
“Fred, I…”
“Tell me, Mike!”
“Da-Dad hurt the guys. Dad said that they were never going to hurt any other little boys.”
“But they didn’t hurt you, did they?”
“No! They were nice to me! I told Dad that—” Michael’s voice had risen into a shrill wail. I was afraid he would wake Doc.
“Mike, I have to go now. Will you promise not to tell your father I called?”
“Yes, I promise.”
“I love you, Mike,” I said, not believing my own ears and hanging up before Michael could respond.
This time it took me a scant twenty-five minutes to make the run back to Milwaukee. Blue Mound Road had become an old friend in the course of three harried hours.
Back within the city limits where Blue Mound Road turned into Wisconsin Avenue, I stopped at a filling station and inquired with the attendant about the whereabouts of Marquette University and Milwaukee’s skid row.
“The two are within shouting distance,” the youth said. “Take Wisconsin Avenue to Twenty-seventh Street, turn left until you hit State Street. Don’t hold your breath, but hold your nose.”
Marquette University extended a solid ten blocks on the periphery of a skid row that rivaled L.A.’s Fifth Street for squalor and sheer despair—bars, package liquor stores, blood banks, and religious save-your-soul missions representing every faith and sect imaginable. I parked my car at Twenty-seventh and State and went walking, dodging and sidestepping knots of winos and ragpickers who were passing around short-dogs and gesticulating wildly at one another, babbling in a booze language compounded of loneliness and resentment.
I took my eyes off the street for five seconds and went crashing to the pavement; I had tripped over an old man, naked from the waist up, his lower body wrapped in a gasoline-soaked tweed overcoat. I got to my feet and brushed myself off, then attempted to help the old man up. I reached for his arms, then saw the sores on them and hesitated. The old man noticed this and began to cackle. I reached instead for a hunk of his overcoat, but he rolled himself away from me like a dervish until he was lying in the gutter in a sea of sewer water and cigarette butts. He cursed me and feebly flipped me the finger.
I left him and continued walking. After three blocks, I realized I had no real destination, and moreover that the denizens of the row had taken me for a cop: my size and crisp summer suit got me looks of fear and hatred, and if I played it right I could use this to my advantage without hurting anyone.
I recalled what Kraus and Lutz had told me: George “The Professor” Melveny, George “The Gluebird” Melveny, former Marquette chemistry teacher, last seen sucking on a rag in front of the Jesus Saves Mission. It was almost noon, and the temperature was soaring. I felt like shedding my suitcoat, but that wouldn’t work: the skid row inhabitants would then know I wasn’t packing a gun and was therefore not the heat. I stopped in my tracks and surveyed the row in all directions: no sign of the Jesus Saves Mission. On impulse I ducked into a liquor store and purchased twenty short-dogs of Golden Lake muscatel. My liver shuddered as I paid, and the proprietor gave me the strangest look I have ever encountered as he loaded the poison into a large paper bag. I asked him for directions to the Jesus Saves Mission, and he snickered and pointed east, where the skid row dead-ended at the Milwaukee River.
* * *
—
There was a line of hungry-looking indigents extending halfway around the block as I approached the mission, obviously waiting for their noon meal. Some of them noticed my arrival and jabbed at one another, signaling the onslaught of bad news. They were wrong; it was Christmas in July.
“Santa Claus is here!” I shouted. “He’s made a list and he’s checked it twice, and he’s decided that all of you folks deserve a drink!”
When all I got was puzzled looks, I dug into my paper bag and pulled out a short-dog. “Free wine for all!” I yelled. “Free cash to anyone who can tell me where to find George ‘The Gluebird’ Melveny!”
There was a virtual stampede to my side. The Jesus Saves Mission and its lackluster luncheon were forgotten. I was the man with the real goodies, and scores of winos and winettes started reaching fawningly toward me, poking tremulous hands in the direction of the brown paper bag I rested out of their reach on my shoulder. Information was screeched at me, tidbits and non sequiturs and epithets:
“Fuck, man.”
“Glueman, Gluebird!”
“Sister Ramona!”
“Wetbrain!”
“Gimme, gimme, gimme!”
“See the sister!”
“Handbill!”
“Glueman!”
“Oh, God. Oh, God.”
“Warruuggh!”
The crowd was threatening to drive me into the gutter, so I placed my brown bag on the sidewalk and backed off as they descended on it like starving vultures. Pushing and shoving ensued, and two men wrestled into the street and began feebly clawing and gouging at each other’s faces.
Within minutes all twenty bottles were broken or snatched up, and the sad boozehounds had dispersed to consume their medicine, except for one particularly frail, sad-looking old man in ragged pants and a Milwaukee Braves T-shirt and Chicago Cubs baseball cap. He just stared at me and waited at the head of the bean line, along with the few other indigents who hadn’t seemed interested in my offering.
I walked over to him. He was blond, and his skin had been burned to a bright cancerous red after years of outdoor living. “Aren’t you a drinking man?” I asked.
“I can take it or leave it,” he said, “unlike some others.”
I laughed. “Well put.”
“What do you want the Gluebird for? He don’t hurt nobody.”
“I just want to talk to him.”
“He just wants to suck his rag in peace. He don’t need no cops bothering him.”
“I’m not a cop.” I opened up my suit coat to show I was bereft of hardware.
“That don’t prove nothin’,” he said.
I sighed and lied: “I work for an insurance company. Marquette owes Melveny some money on an old employee claim. That’s why I’m looking for him.”
I could tell the wary man believed me. I took a five-spot out of my billfold and waved it in front of him. He snatched it up.
“You go down to Sister Ramona’s; that’s four blocks west of here. It’s got a sign out front that says ‘Handbill Passers Wanted.’ The Gluebird’s been working for the sister lately.”
I believed him. His pride and dignity carried authority. I took off in the direction he was pointing.
* * *
—
Sister Ramona was a psychic who preyed on Milwaukee’s superstitious lower middle classes. This was explained to me by one “Waldo,” an ancient bum lounging in front of the storefront where she recruited the winos and blood bank rejects who carried her message via handbill into Milwaukee’s poorer enclaves. She paid off in half gallons of wine that she bought dirt cheap by the truckload from an immigrant Italian wine maker from Chicago. He jacked up the alcohol content with pure grain spirits, which weighed in his vino at a hefty one hundred proof.
Sister Ramona wanted to keep her boys happy. She provided them with free outdoor sleeping quarters in the p
arking lot of the movie theater she owned; she fed them three grilled cheese sandwiches a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year; and she bailed them out of jail if they promised to repay the money by donating their blood for free at the blood bank owned by her gynecologist brother, who recently lost his license from poking too many patients in the wrong hole.
This came out in a torrent of words, unsolicited. Waldo went on to explain that the only trouble with Sister Ramona’s scam was that her boys kept kicking off of cirrhosis of the liver and freezing to death in the winter when her parking lot became covered over with snowdrifts that she never bothered to clear out. Ol’ sister had a high turnover, yes, sir, Waldo said, but there were always plenty of recruits to be found: sister was a wine cono-sewer supreme and she made a mean grilled cheese sandwich. And she wasn’t prejudiced, Waldo said, no sir, she hired white men and Negroes alike and fed them the same and provided them with the same flop-out space in her parking lot.
When I pulled a five-dollar bill out of my pocket and said the words “George ‘The Gluebird’ Melveny,” Waldo’s eyes popped out and he said, “The Genius,” in a voice others reserved for Shakespeare and Beethoven.
“Why is he a genius, Waldo?” I asked as the old man deftly snatched the five-spot out of my hands.
He started jabbering, “Because he’s smart, that’s why! Marquette University professor! Sister made him a crew chief until he couldn’t drive no more. He don’t sleep in her parking lot, he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the summertime on the beach by the lake, and in the wintertime he sleeps in the nice warm boiler room at Marquette. He so smart that sister don’t pay him with no booze—he don’t drink no more; sister pays him off with model airplanes ’cause he like to build them and sniff the glue! The Gluebird is a genius!”
